


A Switchblade

by th_esaurus



Category: Rocketman (2019)
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 12:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19150618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “Do you really like it?” Bernie had asked uncertainly. “It’s--big.”It was an astute observation. The house was fucking big.





	A Switchblade

**Author's Note:**

> please note that this is rocketman fanfiction, not RPF, and is based solely on the depictions and events from that movie.

The house almost feels like a step too far.

He has a burgeoning reputation as a magpie, a diva, unable to resist a glimmering trinket with no price listed. The LA realtor - a word that still makes the Londoner in him guffaw - was clued in enough not to bother showing him anything less than five bedrooms, four bathrooms, two receptions, a pool. Elton does not swim, and the only person who ever sleeps over is Bernie: nonetheless he is immediately taken by the sparkling white facade, faux-Grecian columns and towering ceilings, useless alcoves with tacky vases and anonymous busts. “It’s as fake as I am,” he tells John, and John laughs; doesn’t disagree.

His relationship with John is—

The honeymoon period is a long-distant memory. Things are not _sour_ between them, but they are two quick tempers; two fuses, and neither of them afraid of fire. John might once have treated Elton’s tantrums and whims as something to be soothed with patronising kisses, afternoons of love-making and easy praise; these days he snaps at Elton to get over his childish self-entitlement.

But the house, brand new and gaudy with novelty, is thrilling to them both. Elton had lived in his mother’s paisley council house; the mouse-ridden commune in east London, with Bernie; rested where he could in tour vans and sleeper cabins; and now, he is here. California, Los Angeles, a mansion with too many rooms and a garden that smells of chlorine.

He buys a dollar-store croquet set, kids’ wooden clubs and bright plastic balls, and goads John into playing on the second floor corridor. John, holding up wallpaper swatches against the white walls, had commented that if Elton hit him with one of those idiot balls, he would fuck Elton silly with the business end of the club.

“Is that a warning or a dare?” Elton said, grinning.

*

“Do you really like it?” Bernie had asked uncertainly. “It’s—big.” It was an astute observation. The house was fucking big.

*

“Let’s throw a party,” John announces grandly. Elton is not yet entirely awake, and can’t immediately place the room they’re in. Three - _three_ \- of the grand bedrooms have king beds and en suites, none of them an obvious master, so they’ve been rotating on a nightly basis, casting judgement on the quality of the glowing sunrise, the nocturnal ambience, which room has the best acoustics when John fucks earthy keens out from Elton’s throat.

He rolls over, mouthing kisses at John’s bare shoulder by habit. “Breakfast first?”

“Don’t be obtuse,” John snaps. “A housewarming. Go all out. You’d like that, hmm?”

Elton presses his lips against John’s jaw. John tilts his head just fractionally to the side; he loathes Elton kissing his mouth in the morning, rotten vodka and last night’s wine on his breath, and has made this quite known.

“Yes,” Elton murmurs, coy. “Yes, I’d like it if you’d like it.”

John rolls his eyes, holds Elton still with a sturdy hand in his fragile hair. “Tell me you’d like it.”

“I’d like it.”

John licks at his bottom lip, not inside his mouth but a pleasantly wet, tingling thing. “Good,” he murmurs, in that pleased tone he has sometimes when Elton echoes him perfectly. “Get your breakfast. I’ll make it happen.”

*

“When’s Bernie getting here?” Elton asks, wondering whether to lock one of the guest rooms up for him, lest he find it littered with cigarette butts and condoms once he’s ready to sleep.

“Hmm?” John replies, mild and distracted. “He couldn’t make it. Woman trouble, some nonsense. Sends his love.”

*

Oh, John makes things happen.

*

It is all a noxious, hazy blur: not unpleasant, almost addictive, like the smell of petroleum.

Like Alice clambering through the looking glass, Elton found he couldn’t picture his own rooms clearly, all of them topsy-turvy and foreign in his memory. Not yet familiar enough to know the corridors by touch alone, he recalls stumbling around blindly, focusing on placing one foot in front of the other and keeping the glass of champagne in his hand upright; always, magically, full, no matter how drunk he got.

The party - all two days of it - seems like a Viewmaster slideshow of undersaturated memories: John’s endlessly magnanimous welcomes as peers and strangers flowed through the grand entrance hall, familiar but unplaceable faces, the overlapping music as he traversed between each floor, a different record player on each purring out disco, blues, rock and roll. Hydralike orgies behind closed doors, two, three, seven bodies copulating on Elton’s crisp new sheets; and one room with a single woman in her heels and a slip dress, dancing dreamily to a beat only she could hear.

There was a welcoming mound of coke in one of the bathrooms, snowy white against the black marble, and, unbidden, Elton helped himself to a line; then, he recalls with icy clarity, he suddenly needed, with absolute urgency, to talk to Bernie. To hear Bernie’s voice.

He had scrambled through the grasping crowds to find a telephone, all of them kitschy upright Candlestick phones that made John look like an old master of the estate when he was taking his business calls. He could hear John bellowing for him from downstairs, but he ignored the beckon, barricaded himself in the third floor study and stabbed at the rotary dial, unable to remember Bernie’s number until he closed his eyes and dialed by sense memory.

“Alright?” was Bernie’s easy greeting.

“ _Bernie_ ,” Elton had breathed, almost in raptures.

They chatted, smiling, for almost an hour. Elton doesn’t know about what; only that the soothing lilt of Bernie’s voice calmed him from a panicky fit he didn’t even realise he was on the cusp of. The music sounded good again. John had stopped yelling his name. The frantic sounds of fucking from all corners melted into an uncomplicated melody, swoons and sighs, keening laughter. Bernie talked to him like it wasn’t at all a chore.

“I wish you were here, Bernie,” Elton babbled at the end.

“Where? The house? I’ll come over if you like.”

“I wish you were here _now_.”

“You only need to ask,” Bernie said, a kind of curiosity in his open voice.

John had asked. John _had_ asked, though.

Elton’s ear ached when he hung up, from the hard kiss of the telephone. _I love you, Bern, love you, I love you—_ he had rambled, half joking, like a high-school sweetheart, and Bernie just chuckled, _I love you, brother,_ as he put the phone down miles and miles away in Santa Barbara.

He rediscovered, with no little delight, the bathroom stash of coke, dented but not consumed.

And then he went to find John, needing - Bernie’s love notes lingering in his ears - quite desperately to be fucked.

“I’m hosting and you’re making a fool of yourself,” John had told him tightly as Elton hung on his arm, begging.

“Please, darling, nobody will miss you.”

“Nobody has missed _you_ ,” John replied, his smile stretched. “Where have you been, hmm?”

“Wonderland,” Elton sighed, dream-fettered.

*

After that, distinct memories are hard to come by. Merely shapes and colour, kaleidoscope glitter and shimmering lights.

*

He wakes up in a bedroom he doesn’t know at all.

The curtains are flung open and late-morning light is streaking across his bare body, collapsed and akimbo on the rumbled duvet. He has on a dressing gown, silky against his sensitive skin, but nothing else, and his soft cock feels tacky and used. Perhaps John had relented after all.

There’s an unhung Man Ray print against the far wall of the room, staring at him sideways with huge, bulbous, monochrome eyes. Elton blinks very slowly, and stares back.

The house is not quite empty. The party’s over, that much is clear, but he can hear the tottering echo of someone’s stilettos navigating the corridor a floor up, _clack-clack-clack_ , like a dainty colt. There’s a disgruntled vacuum being dragged back and forth over likely unsalvageable carpets, a small team of cleaners scuttling about the house, paid by John to do a thorough job and keep their mouths shut.

Downstairs, in the cavernous kitchen, he can hear the echo of John’s low voice, smooth with laughter. And then a response: equally soft, equally muffled, entirely unrecognisable.

Elton rolls gracelessly off the bed. He considers showering, but the idea of the water prodding and cajoling him like a drill sergeant for even a second is unbearable. Instead, he staggers into the en suite, slops a damp flannel around his crotch and thighs, then finds a clean pair of briefs - baroque drawers, gold gilded handles. It’s an effort to stay balanced long enough to pull them on.

John’s warm voice is as coaxing as the smell of freshly baked bread. Elton follows it downstairs trippingly, stepping over the signs of the housewarming: smudges of make-up on the walls, discarded shoes, all without partners, an unidentifiable gash in the wood of balustrade.

John will get things fixed up in no time at all. John is ever so good at organising.

*

“Do you really like it?” Bernie had asked, about the house.

*

“Do you really like him?” Bernie had asked, about John.

*

Elton pads into the kitchen sorely, thinking about coffee, and then stops so suddenly he almost rocks, toppling, on the balls of his bare feet. Catches himself at the last second, all at once breathless.

John is sitting with an easy arm slung over the back of his chair, bare chested and quite as his leisure at the dining table: a Wedgwood teacup in his hand, toast and marmalade waiting to be eaten.

Bernie is next to him. Sitting so close he’s almost in John’s lap.

Except it’s—

Except it’s Bernie from years back. 1967, soft hair down to his shoulders, unclouded eyes, uncynical smile.

_Except—_

The eyes aren’t right. Greenish-grey, charming but wrong. His skin is faintly tanned, none of Bernie’s old northern paleness, and he’s muscular around the shoulders and neck in a way Bernie never was. It’s like looking at a polaroid of Bernie that developed poorly, warped and watery, not entirely right.

“Elton,” John says abruptly. “Elton, darling, it’s rude to stare.”

Not-Bernie’s gaze swings upon him, lit up and beaming.

John smiles over the rim of his teacup, very, very widely. “Sit down,” he says easily, gesturing. “I’ve bought you a gift.”  



End file.
